An SMS app provided by the carrier? That seems highly unusual.

No, why would give sending SMS give access to your contact list? The carrier has no system access to the phone contacts app.

Edit: The phone contact app includes a lot more details than just the number. Names, alternative numbers, associated email addresses etc are all in the contacts app and potentially accessible to WhatsApp.

What the carrier has is no different to what WhatsApp gets when you use a number on their service.

It is also inconvenient in many other ways, because Meta makes it intentionally annoying to use WhatsApp without contact permissions 🤷

And no, your carrier does not have access to your phone’s contact list. There is a lot more privacy relevant details in it than pure calling information.

This is literally the main thing Meta is interested in. DO NOT EVER DO THAT, please.

This app can be used as a work around to add contacts in WhatsApp: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dev.theolm.wwc/

Or this one: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.vinaygopinath.launchchat/

then makes the non Muslim women already living there a target by male Muslim fanatics.

This is complete non-sense. The only women really affected by this are second generation immigrant ones that grew up in western society but whom their families do not want to drop the traditional values they brought with them.

No, sadly no active fork of Alexandrite that I could find.

We found a nice fork of the mymlm (old.) frontend though.

There is no competition: Idiocracy, because it isn’t funny anymore when you are in it yourself.

In Discord you also have to pay with your lack of privacy and your text and voice is used to train LLMs, so that is another very real cost.